IORAD Lets You Record Like A Video, Present Like A Powerpoint

Planning for a quick video for your friend on how he can configure his network setting or how he might be able to start a download from YouTube? Or planning for a tutorial for your next blog post. For all the practical reasons you would have done a screen video or a presentation. This time let’s try something in between, something equally(if not more) better, let’s try IORAD.

Sign up for a free account and you will be taken to a page where you can start creating a tutorial. You will be required to start by naming your tutorial first. Next steps involve window selection and then just doing what you wish to demonstrate. As you complete the tutorial you can press “Done” to finish the recording or you can pause the recording midway as well. The recorded clips will now be loaded and you can edit them a slide at a time. Add action buttons from the left which includes Read, Click, Type and Hover. For most of the slides, however, the action buttons are already added. So all you need to do is rectify the mistakes or include a few more.

Be advised that Internet Explorer and Firefox browser are recommended to get the action balloons to be added automatically. IORAD is something in between video and Powerpoint presentations. You get to record the screen just like you would normally do a video screen grab. However, the end result is based on slides and the illustrations are more interactional as the viewer can actually perform the similar actions(demonstrated in the tutorial) on the presentation to move on to the next slide. Although, a streaming slideshow would have been a great addition to the features on the platter. There is also an option to embed any tutorial on a webpage. The size restriction only allows you to add an iFrame of 1000px wide which is quite high for most blog layouts. Take a look at a demo tutorial I created with IORAD.

Apart form browser windows, any window from the PC can be recorded with the tool which would definitely help any presenter to create comprehensive tutorials. One downside is that the fixed window size for the recording is a bummer if tried on many dynamic websites where the elements fall apart once the window is resized. The tool has been there for a while. The older version used to have additional flexibility while recording/editing that are removed in the latest edition. The new interface is simpler and more task oriented. Nevertheless, it’s still a quick and nifty way to create interactive tutorial presentation with precise brevity for anything that happens within a computer screen.